By Mary Lou Nahas
For Capital Region Independent Media
How many of you collect antique local postcards? If you don’t, you might want to consider taking it up as a hobby.
There is something exciting to many people about finding a 1912 postcard with a picture of their house and the people who lived there standing outside. Or a card with a picture of their street when it was dirt road. Or a card with a message written by the owner of their house to her friend in the next town over.
Postcards are relatively accessible and relatively inexpensive and don’t take up much room. Most antique shows have a postcard dealer or two. Even I U Tripp, Antiques and Collectibles sells some regional post cards. Of course, you can certainly find them on EBay and Etsy. Last year I found a great card with a picture of Mooney’s boarding house in East Durham for $4 on Etsy from a dealer in Alabama.
It has been a while since I have run across an Oak Hill card that I don’t own, but I still find East Durham and East Windham cards with pictures of local resorts and boarding houses because they were produced in quantity for the resort business.
When I started collecting local cards about 20 years ago they cost a dollar to $4 or $5. Now prices for good older cards are usually $4 to $7 to $15 or more.
A dealer at one show told me his mother in Florida marks the prices on their cards up every winter and they keep selling. The most expensive card I tried to buy sold to an individual on EBay for more than $50 (my top bid was $50 and I didn’t win the auction). Supposedly the most expensive postcard in history sold for $50,000 at a stamp auction in London. I’ve found no record of a card from our area selling anywhere near that price.
The first American postcard was developed in 1873. Initially, the United States government, owner of the postal business, prohibited private companies from printing “postcards” and mandated that messages could be written only on the front of the cards. Relaxing their rules in 1907, the post office allowed private citizens to produce postcards and individuals to write on the address side of a postcard.
At one time cards produced by the post office could be mailed for one cent and other cards needed two-cent stamps. The post office then allowed all cards to be mailed for one cent. Thus began the Golden Age of American postcards.
Supposedly postcard collecting was especially popular among ladies in upstate New York. You sometimes find scrapbooks with many cards collected by local individuals, both male and female.
The majority of the first cards were printed in and imported from Germany where printing methods were regarded as the best in the world. Many of these cards also had color added to them, so you may find one card with a black and white photo and the same picture in color on another card. However, during the years of WWI, tariffs were placed on imports, and the card business came home to the US.
Oak Hill and Vicinity got in the postcard business early, as local card collectors know. While downstate names appear on the earliest cards, soon two local names appear on the majority of our cards: Pub by P T Hoagland, Oak Hill, Photo by Roscoe W. Delamater, Oak Hill, NY
Hoagland ran the print shop and published a local newspaper in Oak Hill. Delamater was well known as a photographer whose work went far beyond the postcard business, providing a vivid record of early places and people. Carl Ratsch, who later owned Big Acorn Press in Oak Hill, printed many cards, and Delamater is credited as the photographer on a number of them.
After a while the photography and printing were done by many downstate places. If you decide to collect early local cards you could limit your collection to specific subjects, specific printers or photographers, or specific years.
You can find lots of information online to help you know when the cards were produced and what their value might be. Whatever you do, have fun.
